Too long for a text message.: Little things

There are constantly little updates I make around the my home, that just don't seem significant enough for a post of their own. Poor little projects, that don't get the attention they deserve.

Now I am feeling sad on behalf of those projects. Do you guys do that? I have always had a large capacity for sympathy when it comes to inanimate objects. As a kid I always tried to play to equally with my less cute stuffed animals, like this one hedgehog that had one of its eyes miss-sewn and was as an outcome just not cute...I would start to worry that he might feel I played with him less because he wasn't as pleasant to look at, and that he would think I was playing favorites based on looks, and that he probably was sad already because maybe the other toys didn't like him much because of that weird eye and - okay this paragraph is getting away from me.

But anyways, lest they feel left out, here are a couple little updates I never posted about.

1. I replaced the ceiling light in the hall! This is actually such a big impact because you can see it straight ahead when you walk into my home. I posted about updating the hallway here, and even talked about how hard it was to find a glass globe to fit the existing ceiling fixture for cheap, since I did not have any budget for new lighting (lights are expensive!). And then, when I was out cruising goodwill with Ashley, I came upon two matching glass pendant lights for $14.99 each. I nearly talked myself into buying both, but then I came to my senses and remembered how small my house is. I don't need two identical glass pendant lamps. Sigh. So I put one in my basket.

When I reached the check out line, a man behind me said "Oh I saw that lamp, so great, I almost grabbed it." And I excitedly got to say "Hey! There were two, go get the other one!" and we didn't high five, but we totally could have.

I took my light home, it took up space on my kitchen counter for a solid two weeks as these things do, and now it is in the ceiling in the hallway. My relatively low ceilings mean it had to be hung with a pretty short cord, not as much pendant action, but at least my tall friends will be able to walk down my hall without ducking.

The hallway before:

The hallway now:

2. I added a hinge to fix a broken drawer in my chippy dresser.

I am pretty much in love with this little dresser. It is chippy and perfect, and the stamp on the back says it was made right here in Portland. I got this dresser a few years ago, when I was living in my first portland home, a room in a shared house in the NE Alberta neighborhood. Here it is in my old bedroom in that house:

Also, here it is holding down the fort in my living room in my SE Portland apartment:

Anyways, my sweet little vintage dresser survived two moves (and countless others in it's past, I'm sure) but on my move from my SE Portland apartment to the new house, the bottom drawer fell to pieces. I was devastated.

The drawer fell into so many pieces I knew it would not likely work to try and reassemble it, but I held on to the face piece and plannned to try and build a new drawer box in the future.

I actually use a separate dresser for most of my clothes at this point, when I moved into my SE Portland apartment I bought a second cute vintage dresser (also off of craigslist like this one) as I finally had room - not sure if you can tell from the photos, but the bedroom in my Alberta house was teeny teeny tiny (If you are like me you hear that phrase in Rachel Maddow's voice every time. Are you like me? An example of what I mean right here).

So now this little dresser lives in my living room, with the middle drawer holding AV type equipment like my projector for movie nights, and the bottom looking a little...sad.

After chatting with Evan about either rebuilding the drawer, or finding a way to attach the front piece with a hinge, we decided to go with the latter. I've been using the space where the drawer once was to store firewood since since the little dresser is right next to the fireplace, so I really just needed a way for the drawer face to stay in place, but still be able to open to access the space.

We went to the Rebuilding center to look for hinges that might work.